A Tour of the World in Cremations and Cadavers

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By Libby Copeland

Oct. 27, 2017

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY Traveling the World to Find the Good DeathBy Caitlin Doughty Illustrated by Landis Blair 248 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $24.95.

In her latest book, Caitlin Doughty, the self-proclaimed “funeral industry rabble-rouser,” takes readers on a tour of the globe’s most unusual death and grieving practices. “From Here to Eternity” is billed as a search for “the good death” — a bummer of a journey if ever I heard one. But Doughty is a relentlessly curious and chipper tour guide to the underworld, and the weirder things get, the happier she seems.

An undertaker who runs a nonprofit funeral home, Doughty hosts the playful web series “Ask a Mortician” and has basically become the hipster-philosopher of a nascent death-positive movement that’s emerged in America in recent years. American death practices, she writes, have become brief, distant and sterile. Doughty takes readers around the globe in search of alternative rituals and doesn’t hold back on the gory details. In Japan, mourners practice kostuage, using chopsticks to transfer the cremated skeleton bits of their loved ones into urns. In a remote area of Indonesia, villagers mummify, dress, feed and even sleep beside their dead. Doughty lets us know she finds this as jarring as we do.

Doughty is a likable, witty companion. Her first book, about her time as a crematory worker, was titled “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” I pictured her reporting this one while wearing a safari hat over her Bettie Page bangs, discussing soft-tissue decomposition with fellow dead-body professionals she meets in Spain, Japan and North Carolina. At “the only community open-air pyre in America,” in Crestone, Colo., Doughty describes what happens after a deceased woman disappears behind a wall of fire — first the shroud burns, then the soft tissue, the internal organs and on to the bones. In Bolivia, Doughty takes us to meet the 67 skulls, or ñatitas, that a spiritualist named Doña Ely collects and dresses in matching beanies; visitors come to ask for their help with living-people problems. She writes that she’s become enamored of Parsi and Tibetan Buddhist “sky burials,” in which the remains of the dead are set out to be devoured by vultures, although she probably won’t get to have one when the time comes. American funeral directors aren’t clamoring to offer vulture packages.

Who knew there were so many ways to be dead? The point of all this globetrotting exploration is not to gawk (O.K., not just to gawk). Doughty wants Americans to know that there are other ways of doing death — that one culture’s taboos are another’s sacred practices. She’s trying to encourage an eyes-wide-open approach to mortality, because, the thinking goes, if you know how to die differently, you’ll be able to live differently. She writes about the grief of ordinary Americans who are, she believes, denied this — a woman who hides her sadness over the loss of her baby because her grief makes others uncomfortable; another whose brief mourning at her mother’s hospital bedside is cut short by an insensitive doctor. Death avoidance, Doughty writes, is a cultural failing. But culture can be reformed.

Occasionally, Doughty lingers with so much fascination on the gruesomeness of death that the writing becomes salacious, the light tone almost painful. “Sometimes you visit corpses all around the world and realize that the corpses dearest to your heart are right in your own backyard,” she writes, launching into an anecdote about caring for a decomposed body with such enthusiastic detail I practically had to read it through my fingers.

It is a difficult high-wire act: to make death interesting and funny enough that we’ll drop our fears and read, without losing sight of the gravity of the topic. The entertaining adventures are a cover for an attempt at a profound cultural subversion, and for the most part, it works. I couldn’t help thinking that her dispatches from the dark side were doing us all a kindness — offering a picture of what we’re in for, even if we’d rather not know.

Libby Copeland is a journalist who writes on death practices, DNA and other topics.